Reacting to the Supreme Court decision on child rape: From rage to reason
08:28PM Jun 25, 2008 in category 
by George W Frink
When you read my novel "The Four," you will understand why I greeted with a flash of rage the U.S. Supreme Court decision today banning the death penalty for child rape.
Yet rage, I believe, is no basis for justice. So I refocused emotion's energy on constructive reason.
Although there is within me the impulse to tear child rapists limb from limb, that impulse is quieted by the knowledge that our justice is too often unjust.
We have in this country a dismaying, recent history of hysterical child sex crime allegations that were later proved false, of death-penalty murder convictions that
DNA evidence proved wrong and of otherwise punishing the innocent in capital cases.
This is not a defense of the majority legal argument. In my view child rape does grave and lasting damage to the child, inflicting psychological harm whose pain may increase with age until it becomes unendurable. I see no hope for a punishment to fit that crime.
Instead, I find myself in agreement with Louisiana-born Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote in "The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions:"
Honorable people have disagreed about the justice of executing the guilty, but can anyone argue about the justice of executing the innocent?
